Why IR Needs Legitimacy: A Rejoinder

JENS STEFFEK
Universität Bremen, Germany

Introduction
Currently there is hardly an essay on international or global governance that
does not at least mention the issue of legitimacy. The frequent appeal to such
an elusive and contested concept calls for critical reflection. In fact I
considered my recent article in EJIR as an attempt at such conceptual
reflection and clarification — apart from presenting my personal approach to
the topic. Shane Mulligan’s critical questions and remarks show that there is
a continuing need for debate about the concept of legitimacy and the way
we use this term. In his critical approach, Mulligan seems to go further than
I did. While in my article I only asked what we mean when we speak of
legitimacy beyond the state, Mulligan goes further to discuss the con-
sequences that our discursive practice might have in the real world of
international relations. I share his view that social science is not just a passive
observer of international relations but also part of the reality that it seeks to
describe — in particular when it comes to its role as a source of critical or
affirmative argument about the legitimacy of governance. Yet although I am
sympathetic to many questions Mulligan raises I disagree with most of the
answers he proposes.
In this rejoinder I wish to address the following points — first, I will
discuss some specific objections against my theory of discursive legitimation
in international governance that Mulligan raises. In particular I will refute
his claim that an empirical approach to the study of legitimacy beliefs is not
feasible. I will then take issue with him over his insinuation that the
‘migration’ of legitimacy discourse into IR scholarship will lead to a rather
uncritical justification of existing structures of global governance. I share his
concern that at least some of the ‘legitimacy talk’ in IR tends to simply
reproduce the self-legitimating arguments that international organizations

European Journal of International Relations Copyright © 2004

SAGE Publications and ECPR-European Consortium for Political Research, Vol. 10(3): 485–490
[DOI: 10.1177/1354066104045545]
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use. Yet I claim that my approach to legitimacy, focusing on justification and

contestation in political and media discourse, is fit to avoid that trap. It can
capture both the self-legitimation strategies of international organizations
and the challenges brought to them by state actors or global civil society. In
fact, I developed my approach precisely for mapping such conflicts.

Why an Empirical Approach to Legitimacy is Possible

A good deal of Mulligan’s critical remarks revolve around the question
whether an empirical, ‘Weberian’, approach to legitimacy is possible at all,
and his answer is an outright ‘No’. To substantiate this claim Mulligan
argues that I have unduly applied Habermasian social theory to the field of
international relations. Under the conditions of international policy-making,
Mulligan states, the characteristics of Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ are
not present. In a similar vein he claims that in international affairs there is no
‘common lifeworld’ which according to Habermas is a background condi-
tion of and prerequisite for deliberative democracy. In my article, however,
I never claimed that international politics takes place under such conditions
and, as I will show in the following paragraphs, my argument does not
require such heroic assumptions.1 One can argue that international govern-
ance is, in practice, legitimated through discourse, without saying that this
discourse takes place under ideal conditions.
My starting question in the EJIR article was a sociological one — how do
people in modern societies come to believe that a system of governance is
legitimate? The answer I propose is the following — I suppose that people
shape their attitude towards governance mainly on the basis of reasons (and
not, e.g., on the basis of religious sentiments). Individuals are confronted
with reasons for or against supporting a system of governance; they weigh
these reasons and if they find the ‘Pros’ convincing they will develop a sense
of obligation towards the respective political system. If they do not find
them convincing people are prone to oppose the system in words and deeds,
publicly or privately. I assume that the reasons people have to support
governance are not developed in solitude, but emerge through a process of
intersubjective communication, that is, through discourse. Hence I believe
that legitimacy-creating beliefs are conveyed through political and media
debate, that the carriers of these reasons are arguments, and that therefore
discourse is the right proxy to study processes of legitimation and de-
legitimation. To say that discourse is a mechanism of belief formation does
not prejudice under what ideal or non-ideal conditions it takes place.
Neither does it predict whether the empirical tendency will be towards
successful legitimation or towards a de-legitimation of a given governance
regime.

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In as much as I refer to Jürgen Habermas, I only do this to highlight the

discursive character of legitimation. Mulligan’s argument in fact seems to
conflate the normative and the descriptive content that coexists in
Habermas’s social theory when he argues that we cannot ‘posit a distinctly
“empirical” legitimacy deriving from Habermas’s clearly normative argu-
ments’ (Mulligan, 2004: 480). Yet not all arguments in the work of Jürgen
Habermas are normative in nature. To give an example, the (sometimes
counterfactual) supposition that other speakers mean what they say is a
pragmatic precondition for successful communication, not just a Haber-
masian ought.2 Only in a second step, after exploring the pragmatics of
communication, does Habermas identify certain institutional conditions that
facilitate reaching political agreement through argumentation. And only in a
third step does Habermas advance the normative claim that in designing or
reforming political institutions we should strive towards such institutional
conditions. However, this brief reply is certainly not the right place to
engage in an exegesis of Habermasian social theory. Let us return to the role
of discourse in the legitimation of international governance.

Why the Study of Legitimacy Beliefs is Possible

With regard to my ideas about the genesis of legitimacy in international
affairs, Mulligan criticizes an unclear relationship between political or
diplomatic consensus and citizens’ consensus. Here he is indeed revealing a
gap in my argument with regard to different spheres of communication.
Negotiation among politicians about international institutions is quite
different from wider public discourse, and only public discourse can reach
citizens as the ultimate addressees of legitimacy. As far as intergovernmental
negotiation is concerned I accept Mulligan’s call for caution. The fact that
arguments are made in these negotiations should not make us believe that
these are always the main motivating force behind agreement. However, it is
interesting to note that the mere fact that a certain norm or principle was
adopted by broad international consensus lends particular strength to it.
When, for example, the United Nations has agreed on a norm by consensus,
this constitutes a supreme potential for its justification. In regarding UN
approval of a norm as a justificatory resource we routinely assume that there
has been, indeed, a reasoned consensus among delegates and not some
bargaining compromise. We seem to instinctively (and again, sometimes
counterfactually) assume that approval of a norm also implies approval of its
prescriptive content. By means of being a supreme resource of justification,
consensus at the intergovernmental level can facilitate adherence to a norm
also among citizens.

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A second line of Mulligan’s criticism touches upon the question whether

average citizens can have something like legitimacy beliefs at all and if,
consequently, we can inquire into them. It echoes David Beetham’s idea that
average people might not understand legitimacy well enough to hold any
beliefs of this sort (1991: 13). People might in fact not understand
Beetham’s or Mulligan’s or my own academic jargon — and still have
legitimacy beliefs. I take it to be a perfectly acceptable and sufficient
reasoning to find a political system cruel, oppressive or unjust, and therefore
illegitimate. It is equally sufficient to find that the system has fair procedures,
generates just distribution, respects the law, allows free speech, and to
therefore think that it deserves to be supported and the laws made by it
deserve to be obeyed. If we find that people make connections of the
‘therefore’-type between value judgements and their support for a system of
governance we see legitimacy at work. I fail to see why it should be
impossible to investigate such reasons for political support empirically.
Now, how can we come to know about such legitimacy beliefs? We might
study discourse, as I suggested in EJIR, but we could also use surveys with
a specifically designed questionnaire to inquire into the reasons for regime
support (not just the overall level of support that, for example, the
Eurobarometer seeks to measure). Such surveys would provide us with first-
hand information on people’s legitimacy-related beliefs. In formulating such
a survey it would certainly be ridiculous to ask average people Mulligan’s
question — ‘Do you hold the WTO in such regard that you feel its dictates
are morally binding?’ (2004: 478). In fact, very few surveys in social science
can formulate their questionnaire in highly abstract, academic terms. Take as
an example the concept of xenophobia. One normally would not ask in
questionnaires, ‘Do you hold xenophobic attitudes?’; but would rather ask
questions such as, ‘Do you think that migrants are a threat to public
order?’
Consequently we should approach legitimacy indirectly via possible
reasons or motives for legitimacy beliefs. We might use the three categories
for the evaluation of governance regimes that I suggested — scope and
issues of governance, fairness of rule-making procedures and justice of
outcomes. Questions could be — ‘Do you think that the WTO is right in
promoting free trade? Do you think that the WTO respects citizens’
concerns in rule-making? Do you think that the WTO works for the benefit
of everybody? Do you think that the WTO contributes to a just world
order?’
With regard to specific citizen beliefs about international institutions,
Mulligan is asking whether the absence of overt protest against international
organizations indicates that they are regarded as legitimate. Is, in other
words, a ‘permissive consensus’ enough? I think that this can be said for

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organizations such as the EU, the UN or the WTO that enjoy some public
visibility. However, in the case of organizations that are completely removed
from public attention and that only experts have ever heard of, Mulligan is
certainly right. In the complete absence of public debate about an institution
of governance, citizens cannot form any legitimacy beliefs pertaining to that
institution.

Why the Study of Legitimacy is Not Apologetic

In the last section of his comments Mulligan explores what I would call the
‘apologetic effects’ that the increasing migration of legitimacy into inter-
national relations thinking might have. His idea is, if I understand it
correctly, that we reaffirm existing structures of power once we even ponder
whether they might be legitimate, and thus, normatively privileged. He
suggests that talking about legitimacy in IR ‘further commits our inquiry to
this discourse, to this form of reasoning which must seek the justification of
domination, the right of rule, the legitimacy of law.’ (2004: 483). I agree
with Mulligan insofar as we always should watch out for the roads not taken
that our choice for a specific concept precludes. Yet I fail to understand why
the recent boom in academic legitimacy debate should inevitably lead to a
predominance of ‘juridical approaches’ that just take up dominant self-
legitimation strategies of international organizations.
The approach to legitimacy I proposed does not aim to declare current
global governance arrangements legitimate. On the contrary, through the
empirical analysis of discursive challenges to this system of governance we
learn about alternative perspectives. We might even detect and denounce
instances in which power holders seek to suppress or marginalize alternative
voices. Analysing legitimacy conflicts therefore is in and of itself an
emancipatory enterprise. In fact, by raising the question of legitimacy the
discipline of IR seems to be getting more critical towards international
governance. It breaks with the traditional, truly legalistic, vision that
international organizations are instituted by Treaties concluded between
state governments and ratified by national parliaments, and are ipso facto
legitimate. It equally breaks with the regime literature’s focus on the
effectiveness of global governance. In fact, international distribution,
development concerns, human rights and social welfare, etc. have become
major issues for global governance studies. Many authors who write on the
legitimacy of international organizations and their policies ask precisely
those questions that go beyond a legalistic approach. I confine myself to
name just the widely read and cited work of Ngaire Woods (2003) and
David Held (2003) here. My impression is that by exploring the manifold
dimensions of legitimacy we are overcoming a legalistic bias in the study of

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international governance. Therefore, the question of legitimacy should

retain its prominent place on the IR agenda.

Notes
1. My theory of discursive legitimation is not intended to be a normative one.
However, I am currently exploring possible normative portents of deliberation for
global governance elsewhere with a colleague (Nanz and Steffek, 2004). There
our aim in fact is to assess under what conditions enhanced deliberation can
become an asset for the democratic quality of international governance arrange-
ments. Some of our concerns are quite similar to Mulligan’s, e.g. that there is
unequal opportunity for influencing discourse, that states can ignore the concerns
of disadvantaged groups of stakeholders, etc.
2. To support his argument Mulligan mentions the double meaning of the German
term ‘Verständigung’ that Habermas uses frequently and that can mean both a
successful communication of meaning and an agreement — quite like ‘under-
standing’ in English can mean both comprehension and agreement. It has been
pointed out, however, that ‘Verständigung’ as comprehension is a prerequisite for
strategic communication as well, and therefore cannot carry normative connota-
tions (Greve, 1999).

References
Beetham, David (1991) The Legitimation of Power. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Greve, Jens (1999) ‘Sprache, Kommunikation und Strategie in der Theorie von
Jürgen Habermas’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 51(2):
232–59.
Held, David (2003) ‘From Executive to Cosmopolitan Multilateralism’, in David
Held and Mathias Koenig-Archibugi (eds) Taming Globalization, pp. 160–86.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mulligan, Shane (2004) ‘Questioning (the Question of) Legitimacy in IR: A Reply
to Jens Steffeck’, European Journal of International Relations 10(3): 475–84.
Nanz, Patrizia and Jens Steffek (2004) ‘Global Governance, Participation and the
Public Sphere’, Government and Opposition 39(2): 314–35.
Woods, Ngaire (2003) ‘Holding Intergovernmental Institutions to Account’, Ethics
and International Affairs 17(1): 69–80.

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